There are a lot of rare things in the world,
and it’s more than likely you will never come across one of those things. We could
ask how many times you’ve asked to borrow some money from your mother and she said,
“Yeah, take my purse and go crazy.” And she meant it! How many of you have been caught
up in a rain shower but down came hundreds or thousands of frogs, or perhaps spiders?
It’s happened. Who’s seen an albino alligator, or maybe a pygmy three-toed sloth just hanging
around? Do you think you’ll ever find a Red Beryl, one of rarest gemstones in the
world? It’s not likely, but it’s even more unlikely you’ll ever come across what
we’ll talk about today, in this episode of the Infographics Show, What are the Rarest
Substances in Nature? So, we’ll come right out with it and tell
you that the rarest substance on this planet is something called “Astatine.” This is
a radioactive chemical element found in the Earth’s crust. That makes it a little bit
hard to find, of course. It’s known as a decay product, which in laymen’s terms means
it’s the result of transformations in radioactive decay. Its name comes from the Greek word,
“astatos”, which means unstable. It’s so unstable that as soon as you saw it, it
would not be there anymore. It belongs on the Periodic Table with a group called Halogens,
which also includes fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine. As for just how rare it is, while
sources differ, most say that at any one time, there is less than 25 grams of it in the Earth’s
crust. Scientists have never just pulled a piece
of this stuff out of the crust. Its physical appearance is an extrapolation derived from
what it’s made out of. We are told it should have the appearance of a hard, black, shiny
metal. Ok, so how did we ever guess this stuff exists?
Well, in 1869, when Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev laid out the Periodic Table, there
was a missing piece under iodine, and it was assumed that a fifth halogen should be there.
This position was what was called element No. 85, and Mendeleev called the missing element
“eka-iodine”. What followed in the ensuing decades were
a series of failures to find this element. Then in 1931, an American physicist thought
he had cracked it and called it “alabamine”. Then a few years later, in 1934, H. G. MacPherson
from the University of California said he had disproved those claims, and yet again
in 1937, a guy working in what’s now known as Bangladesh said he could prove that element
85 was in fact something he called “Dakin.” Another paper came out in 1936, written by
Horia Hulubei and Yvette Cauchois, two researchers working at the Sorbonne in Paris. It was in
1940 that we first artificially produced some of the stuff. That was at the University of
California when researchers Dale Coson, Kenneth Ross Mackenzie, and Emilio Segrè, bombarded
the isotope bismuth-209 with alpha particles inside a particle accelerator. Voila, they
got their substance, and as it was so unstable, they gave it that Greek name. Nowadays scientists
are researching how effective this element could be for treating people with cancer,
but that research is ongoing. In 2015, some French researchers released a paper that indeed
said that this ultra-rare substance worked in treating some cancers. We can produce it
artificially, but we can’t seem to find how much that costs. Talking about costs, let’s have a look at
some of the rarest substances that do have a price tag.
The winner is something called Antimatter. As the name suggests, this stuff is the opposite
of matter. Hmm, what’s that? Well, inside an atom you have protons, neutrons, and electrons.
Antimatter is a kind of reverse matter, consisting of "antiparticles", where protons don’t
have a positive electrical charge but a negative one, and these are called Antiprotons. Electrons
which generally have a negative charge have a positive charge, called positrons. In simple
terms, everything is reversed. And apparently these antimatter particles have been made
at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. What on Earth is this stuff? Well, we are
told when the Big Bang happened, and the universe was created, there was about an equal amount
of matter and antimatter, but fortunately for us, matter got on top and that’s why
anything exists. Alright, so how much does it cost: NASA tells us $62.5 trillion per
gram. Why is it important? We are told that when we produce antimatter and then it interacts
with normal matter, it produces unbelievable amounts of energy. That energy could be used
for sending spaceships into the unknown, or something like that. Science has cooked up other strange substances
that are extremely costly, such as the spherical cage of carbon known as Buckminsterfullerene.
Apparently that costs about $150 million per gram. That said, we looked online and one
website had an almost pure version of this stuff for just a few thousand dollars per
kilo. Then there is the man-made radioactive element called Californium, which goes for
around $27 million per gram. But what’s the rarest stuff anyone could find, if they
just got very lucky walking in the wilderness? Well, diamonds seem to be everyone’s best
friend in this department. People find them all the time, so you might guess they are
certainly not the rarest gem stones in the world. Still, they are worth a ton of money
if you find the right kind. It was reported in 2017 that a minister in Sierra Leone found
a huge diamond worth as much as $70 million. He didn’t need any fancy equipment, either.
From the reports though, it’s sounds as though the government is going to give him
a small reward and claim most of the cash for itself. Then there was the 14-year old
kid who found a much smaller diamond in Arkansas state park in 2017. While his find might not
even get him one million dollars, it’s not bad for something he just saw floating in
a stream of water. Diamonds by the way get you about $50,000 per gram, but that depends
on overall size and quality. You’ll only get $20,000 per gram for the
gem stone Taaffeite, even though it’s much rarer than diamond. So is the gem we mentioned
in the introduction, Red Beryl. This goes for about $9,000 a gram even though it’s
unbelievably hard to find. It’s only been discovered in the U.S. states of Utah and
New Mexico. Then you’ve got to go all the way to Myanmar to find another very rare rock,
Painite, which goes for about $8,500 a gram. The incandescent gem called Alexandrite is
said to go for as much as $70,000 a carat. A carat equals 200mg, so that’s $350,000
a gram. The bigger the gem, the higher the cost per carat, so we think that amount given
by one gem website was considering one huge stone. We are told the normal cost for this
gem is $12,000 per carat. The darker moodier-looking gem of Musgravite will get you around $6,000
a carat, which is about $30,000 a gram. Other very rare gems that cost a fortune are Grandidierite
($20,000 per carat) and Serendibite ($18,000 per carat). The winner for the most prized
gem is the Red Diamond, which we are told can be 100s of thousands of dollars per carat
or even as much as one million. The largest ever found was 5.11 carats and that was picked
up from a river in Brazil by a farmer. It’s thought to be worth about $20 million. We should point out again that these prices
can change according to many reasons relating to size and quality. We hope you get lucky
one day and find a rare gem. So, what’s the rarest, most valuable thing
you’ve ever found? Let us know in the comments! Also, be sure to check out our other video
called the deadliest substance in the world. Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t
forget to like, share and subscribe. See you next time!
